Greek Lyric poets
 

I'm teaching lyric poets in my Greek Civ. class this week. I had forgotten just how great they were. Here's my favorite fragment (for the moment) by Archilochus.

πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα. (fr. 201)

Roughly translated:
"The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one - a really good one."

Anyone else got some nice lyric fragments to share, or am I alone in my nerdiness?

What program do you have to write the Greek Script.

I like that one.

All due respect but I actually prefer Isaiah Berlin's translation, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." But not because that's how I read the Greek.

Your signature is great, too.

Sappho:

Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen; goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow.

Wealth without virtue is a dangerous guest;
Who holds them mingled is supremely blest.

That's the one I was familair with as well. I know no Greek, but Berlin's seems a ltitle more powerful in English.

That's probably a better translation - more vague, since what the fox knows is something that's neuter-plural. I (and Bernard Knox, I guess) chose "tricks" because the fox is a trickster, but you could translate it differently for a different effect.

It's a beautiful language.

To be honest the only Greek I really know is from the SNL skit with John Belushi:

"Cheeburga, cheeburga, cheeburga. No Coke. Pepsi."

I don't know if you're looking for Greek only, but I remember the first time I read this in the Aeneid:

"Equo ne credite, Teucri. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis."

The problem with pc's and Greek fonts in general is that there is no freeware Unicode typing program. You can use New Athena Unicode (freeware) for reading unicode Greek letters, but you can't type them. Since I'm too cheap to pay the steep unicode-typing fees for an appropriate font, I'm forced to find something in Unicode (I use the TLG - Thesaurus Linguae Graecae), which I have access to through the university), and then copy-and-paste it. If I have to type something from scratch (for a quiz, for example), then I have trouble. I either end up copying-and-pasting a single letter at a time from some random text of Greek, or writing accents in by hand before I run it through the photocopier.

Macs have much better unicode-typing capabilities, but I can't afford one that's comparable to my PC in other categories.

Good advice, and a great line.